Back in 2001, the Human Genome Project gave us a complete readout of our DNA, unraveling that magic sequence of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts that contained all the information for making one of us. Thanks to that, we now know that in that sequence only 1.5% has information to make proteins, a fact that […]
Since the cells were discovered with the advent of the microscope in the late seventeenth century, scientists have tried hard to find out what is going on into them. An avalanche of techniques and technologies emerged over the course of decades slowly discovering important molecular features of the cellular world to our knowledge and our […]
Photoreceptor degeneration is one of the most common causes of partial as well as total blindness. However, one of its “positive” -or at least, not so negative- characteristics is that, while light-sensing photoreceptor cells in the surface of the retina are damaged, the inner retinal cell layers and the central visual pathways remain intact over […]
Most famous RNAs are coding or messenger RNAs (mRNAs) which are the ones that ribosomes read to synthesize proteins. However, many other RNAs are transcribed from DNA and are known as non-coding RNAs. Among those, ribosomic RNAs (rRNAs) which are part of the ribosomes and transfer RNAs (tRNAs) which deliver the amino acids to the […]
The term epigenetics refers to heritable changes in gene expression (active vs. inactive genes) that does not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequence. It results in change in phenotype without a change in genotype. An easily comprehensible example are identical twins: since they develop from a single fertilized egg, they have the same genome […]
We all have listened about gene therapy, and for those who are old enough not in a good way, at all. Gene therapy became the most promising clinical therapy in the 1990s and this technology was meant to transform medicine. In essence, the concept of gene therapy is pretty simple: the introduction of an exogenous […]
Last Friday I was, as is always the case listening to an enthusiastic talk given by one of the PhD students from my department. As part of her PhD work, she is trying to understand why periodontitis, an inflammatory disease where gums get swollen as a consequence of bacterial infection, is essentially painless. This is […]
“ Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering”. Grand Master Yoda This is the second chapter of a series of 2 articles that pretends to illustrate how the emotional state of our parents influence our brain development. The first article focused completely […]
We are one of a kind because our genetic background says so. When our parents conceived us, one set of chromosomes from each of them merged to create a brand new diploid cell called zygote, which is already unique. Yet, such singularity doesn’t start with the zygote itself, but much earlier with our progenitors. The […]
You have around 3,000 million letters in you genome. And so does your neighbour, your boss or your gym instructor. They go like this: ATGC…and so on. The four same letters over and over in endless different combinations. What makes you yourself and, extensively, what makes your boss a distinctive and unique human being, is […]